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IT Professional Skills

Tag Archives: #icollab

Over seventy students recently completed the year-long CT231 module in Professional Skills. For their final Digital Media Projects, students were asked to develop a resource for an audience beyond their own class and university, choosing whatever form of digital media they wished — blog, video, audio, app, etc. The range of topics was impressive — spanning music, dance, sport and fitness, Irish history and legend, education, gaming, social media, computers, computer science and information technology. Students also were asked to publish their projects openly online, using only their own work or openly-licensed content, and to make their work available with a Creative Commons license. Students shared their work via social media using #ct231, our course hashtag, as well as #icollab, the hashtag shared by the 7 student cohorts (from Galway to Auckland, NZ) who share their work in the iCollab community of practice.

All of the projects were interesting — a few which attracted particular attention in the form of comments, shares and retweets were:

Over the past few weeks, members of the #iCollab community of practice have been adding points of interest (POIs) to an iCollab Google Map. Initially, we are adding our own profiles, but this will extend over the coming weeks and months to include other geolocated data, e.g. images, video, audio, etc. We are also using the mobile app Wikitude to create mobile augmented reality worlds, providing opportunities for collaboration by linking geotagged content.

iCollab Community of Practice (CoP) – click for interactive map

CT231 students: following are the instructions for adding yourself to the iCollab CoP map and using the Wikitude app:

This week we engaged in an online conversation with NUI Galway academic staff taking the #cel263 Learning Technologies module to share ideas about openness in higher education. We engaged in conversation via a Twitter chat and were joined online by several others interested in this topic, including participants in the #iCollab project.

In CT231 we have been exploring social media, digital identities and privacy, as have been the lecturers taking #cel263. We met online for a 30-minute Twitter chat during our CT231 class, to share ideas about the advantages and risks of openness in higher education, including the use of open social media tools for learning and teaching. Over the course of about half an hour, we discussed openness, collaboration, privacy, boundaries, using Facebook and Twitter, power dynamics in higher education, and more.

John Davitt has described Twitter as “a tool for anarchic learning and peer support”. While it is often challenging to follow ideas in the chaos of a lively Twitter chat, conversations often develop, threads emerge, and connections are made. In our chat, many of these become visible when the chat was reviewed and curated, as illustrated in the Storify above. Engaging in a Twitter chat while sitting in a room with others (as we did in our CT231 class), gave us an opportunity to discuss the Twitter chat before, during and after it took place. The post-chat discussion was especially valuable, with many in the room sharing honestly about their fears and reservations, as well as their expectations and learning.

Advantages and disadvantages were highlighted for both Blackboard (as representative of VLEs, or Virtual Learning Environments) and open tools like social media. Perhaps, in higher education, we are moving towards more hybrid learning environments, where the relative advantages of both VLEs and open tools can be used to create multi-faceted learning environments, where student voices play a greater role.

We will continue to explore these issues within our class. CT231 students will have opportunities to develop and reflect on these experiences and ideas throughout the module — much of this will be aggregated via the hashtags #ct231 (for our module) and #icollab (as part of the larger #iCollab project), and shared here in our course blog and later in the CT231 Student Showcase.

Over the coming weeks, CT231 students will have the opportunity to collaborate with students in Spain (Barcelona), Germany (Berlin), New Zealand (Auckland) and the UK (Salford) on the iCollaborate or #icollab project. Our class will be bringing Ireland into #icollab for the first time.

The project, now in its third year, is described by Helen Keegan as “a community of practice where… students work together on creative social tech projects that cross disciplines, levels, time and space.” Coordinating a project with students in 5 countries, crossing 12 time zones, and working in different terms has its challenges. But the project coordinators decided at the start to view these differences as an asset. Students in each location share their work and students in other locations can engage and connect — sometimes immediately, sometimes later that day, sometimes much later. As Helen Keegan describes:

“We’re now looking at the ‘tag-team model’ of education: the projects never end, as there is always a cohort to carry on, and lead into the next group, and when they overlap that’s great – that’s where the genuine collaboration happens. …Traditionally, we deliver modules/courses, neatly chunked into 12 weeks, with units of assessment, leading to grades etc. and that’s the way things are (generally) done. I’m not saying scrap all of that, but I do think that modules are best served as springboards to other things. Increasingly, students are connecting across levels and cohorts through Twitter and now we have ex-students getting together with current students, undergrads coming to postgrad classes (and vice versa) as they’ve connected online and have a genuine interest in getting involved in other groups/further curricula outside of their taught modules.”

As the Galway group’s first foray into sharing across those boundaries, CT231 students are posting their Ignite presentations online (via the CT231 Student Showcase), inviting feedback and conversation. The #icollab team in New Zealand asked if CT231 students would also be willing to post videos of their presentations, as another means of students connecting and sharing. Last week we did a trial run of this using the Bambuser app. Bambuser enables live video streaming from mobile phones or webcams. Using the app is simple: one click opens the app, one click records and streams (in public or private), and one click stops recording and uploads to the user’s Bambuser page. Once posted on that page, others can view the video and add comments.

One of our student presenters agreed to be filmed this week so that we could trial the app and learn how best to use it for recording presentations (thanks, Jack!). The experiment was a success and we learned some valuable tips for future recordings. After sharing the video via #icollab, feedback from New Zealand was available to us the following morning (thanks, Thom!). We look forward to extending the collaboration with students in the coming weeks.

In class this week, we’ll have a further discussion about how we’d like to be involved in #icollab — discussing the terms and vision for the project, as we see it. Looking forward to it!